Room With A View

Where I Write: Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors in their Creative Spaces is a site created by photographer Kyle Cassidy. On the site Cassidy does just what the title suggests, he photographs authors where they write. Personally I find the photos fascinating and it is a good site to use with students when one teachers about authors and the writing process.

I have always justified my messy work spaces as being part of my creativity. Unfortunately, the photos do not support my rationale. Though the majority of the author’s work spaces are somewhat unkempt there are others that are monk like in their sparsity and simplicity. Oh well, please don’t tell my wife about this.

Quickmuse is a beatnik like poetry site. Poets are given a prompt and fifteen minutes to create a poem. Through the miracle of modern technology, the process is recorded in real time. Poems are archived. They can be viewed as finished pieces or in “playback” mode. Playback gives one a glimpse into the process the poet went through keystroke by keystroke. I’m not certain of the ties to K-12 education but Secondary English and Theory of Knowledge come to mind.

Zotero is a free Firefox extension for keeping track of references when conducting research. According to their website:

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

I’ve just played with it a little but it looks great. It appears to have the functionality of End Note but with a much better price–free! Users can keep track of citations, notes, and even attach files. When it’s time to create a reference list, there are several styles it can use including MLA and APA.

I’m not sure how well it will configure on school computers which are shared. Will students references–known as Libraries in Zotero–and their files be saved on individual hard drives or can they be saved to a student’s documents folder? I know the files can be exported at the end of a work session but it would be great if it could all be done automatically.

Thanks to at Jeff Utrecht for his recent post entitled Top 5 Firefox2 Extensions For Educators.

I know I’m a little behind the times but I just downloaded Firefox 2.0 for OS X. I love the fact that it’s got a spell checker built into it. I’ve always disliked writing in a browser, preferring to write posts in Word and then copy them to my blog. With a built in spell checker, writing directly in Firefox just got a whole lot better.

The folks on the Seedlings Podcast were talking about Google Notebook so I installed it yesterday and have been playing around with it. It’s an extension for Firefox and Internet Explore that let’s a person copy and paste text from a webpage into their Google Notebook without leaving the page. (No extension for Safari at this point.) It has huge potential for kids doing research. They can be working at home, at school, or a friend’s house and still have access to their notes.

Of course plagiarism and making sure that kids write things in their own words are issues but they have been for a while. (People have been pasting text into word-processors for years.) It looks pretty good.

My class’ wiki is now up and running and available for the world to see. It’s a place for the students to post their writing, work collaboratively, and for me to post news and photos about the class. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with short videos of the students commenting on things they’re doing.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I usually teach my students that the writing process goes something like this: plan, draft, revise, edit, and publish. I also teach them that it doesn’t really happen exactly in this way but it’s a good guide to help us as we write.
I also, mentioned that since starting the wiki my students are not following the writing process. It’s more write, publish, write some more, publish, revise a little, publish and so on. I’m not sure I like this. I’m concerned about the quality of the writing my students are producing. I think the quality of the conversations going on in my room and the collaboration is fantastic—better than before the wiki—but I’m not sure about the quality of the writing that my students are publishing. They are so keen to publish that they seem to have forgotten the processes I’ve worked hard to establish with them since the beginning of the year. I went in search of some answers to my concerns. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any research on the subject of writing conventions but I did find a summation of several studies about blogs. Miranda Bella wrote the summary. Here are some of the key points.

• Students put more thought and effort into their blog writing because they know they have a wide audience for their work.
• Students can strengthen their reading skills by reading blogs.
• Students that are quiet in class come alive on a blog.
• Some teachers are concerned that the casualness of blogs means that students don’t pay enough attention to writing conventions.
• There are concerns that students’ work can be too public when published on the web.

Bella, M. (2005). Weblogs in education In B. Hoffman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Technology. Retrieved March 2, 2006, from http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/blogsined/start.htm